


The Man With No Face

by rabbit_hearted



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, GUYS, bounty hunter!lauren, let me just repeat that BOUNTY HUNTER LAUREN, my brains got worms, rootin tootin falootin wild west au, shes just a lot in this, when i say yee you say haw
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:01:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26274535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: For the average bounty hunter, a man without a face is a compass without a needle. Unfortunately for the Purple Hyacinth, the Red Hound isn’t average.
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 37
Kudos: 43





	1. The Man With No Face

**Author's Note:**

> This seed of this idea has technically lived in my brain since Soph drew that Western AU doodle in the S1 Q&A, and then I rewatched Django Unchained and that the seed grew into an invasive species of weed that made focusing on any other story completely impossible. That weed is called Bounty Hunter Lauren.
> 
> Pursuing two longfics simultaneously sounds like the ninth circle of Hell, so I’m limiting this to a mini arc. Maybe ... 3 chapters? More? Who knows! My brain's got worms. 
> 
> Yee haw!

Throw a dart at a map. Hit a tiny spit of land in the southernmost point of coastal Texas, a gnawed-off, geographical afterthought, if anything, a tiny thumbprint bordered on all sides by layers and layers of rambling blue. Tie a spool of red twine to that dart and connect the arterial line as far west as you can go before smacking into the wall of oppressive heat otherwise known as Ysleta, all scrubby, parched underbrush and flat horizon. 

Complete this exercise in each direction until you’ve created a blood-red polygon. Towns dot these lines like pocket change — Presidio and Del Rio and Laredo — but the locals ubiquitously refer to this stretch of land as The Sinclair Pass. 

That’s because there isn’t a criminal that walks this line that Lauren Sinclair, the Red Hound, hasn’t tracked down. 

* * *

The day that Kieran White barrels into Lauren Sinclair’s awareness like a fly to a windowpane is the hottest in Ardhalis County’s recent history. Thick, sinful heat pulses in the stagnant air like the belly of a living thing, up and down in kinetic motion, relentless enough to bring a dogged atheist to their knees in a prayer for rain. 

Lauren’s horse snorts derisively as she winds a rope between the saddle and a watering hole. It lifts its pointed gaze to the sun, a cracked egg in the cloudless sky, then back to Lauren’s face. 

“I know,” she murmurs placatingly. “I’ll only be a minute.” 

She rounds the back of the horse and stares dispassionately at the dark form slumped over the side of the saddle, neck bent toward the dusty earth, arms spread akimbo, like a signpost pointing directly to Hell. Krist Schaeffer lifts his head and spits a curse in her general direction — or, what he assumes it to be — but the word is muffled through the layer of canvas bag she’d tied around his neck. Lauren makes quick work of the knot and pulls it so hard that his head snaps forward with the reverberation. She clenches the scratchy fabric in her fist, now dampened with sweat and respiration. 

“I didn’t hear you,” Lauren says dryly. “What was that?”

Schaeffer pulls in a ragged lungful of hot air. “I _said,_ ” he pants, “ _Fu_ -”

“Oh, sorry,” she interjects, slow and low. “I forgot that I don’t care.” She lifts her boot to his cheek, her spur grazing the flushed curve of his neck, his Adam's apple twitching like the broiled horizon line. How easily she could knick the papery flesh there, like a palm through a stack of playing cards. In the end, she merely digs the leather toe of her boot into the paunchy underside of his chin. “Get up.”

He spits into the dirt and then speaks, his voice like rocks scraping rocks, weathered and flinty. “How do you suggest that I do that? You’ve tied my goddamn legs up.” 

“You’re a smart man, Schaeffer. Be creative.” The sun falls in scorched waves through the mesh of her Stetson hat. She tilts the brim down with her forefinger. “Come on, now.” 

Schaeffer rolls his weight forward and kicks his legs in the air, creating enough force to send him careening toward the sunburnt earth like a dead fish, stirring dust and lethargic cicadas in the impact. Lauren sidles up next to him, ablaze in seraphic golden light, looming above his head like a crooked angel. Her mouth is a mean little hyphen, a blade sharpened at both ends. 

“I knew you had it in you.” She grips a fistful of his sweaty collar and hauls him up and directly through the swinging doors of the Grim Goblin Saloon, creating a thundercrack of man against wood so loud that even the birdsong draws to an apocalyptic quiet. Schaeffer’s chin cracks against the scuffed wood, and he spits a mouthful of blood across the saloon floor like a Rorschach test. 

“How many times do I gotta tell you, Sinclair?” Sheriff Hughes Hermann brings his fists down on the bar-top, rattling the dirty window panes. “ _No blood_ in the _goddamn_ saloon.”

“Just once more will do,” Lauren murmurs, lighting a cigarette between her teeth. She nudges Schaeffer with her toe. “You owe me two hundred dollars.”

Hermann pulls his palm over his jaw, and then he stands and crosses the length of the floor, his spurs hitting the wood with each step like a metal drumbeat. He kneels down next to Schaeffer’s head and then flicks his gaze back up to Lauren. When he speaks, the wad of dip wedged in his lower lip bobs like an asteroid in the cosmic void. “Where’d you find this poor son of a bitch?” 

Lauren blows a plume of smoke through her teeth. “About three miles east of the border.” 

Hermann clicks his tongue. “Figures.” He stands and crooks his finger toward the back of the bar, where Officer Harvey Wood sits, spinning the lip of a beer bottle between his fingertips. He’s a mousy little thing with a perpetually nervous expression, all wire and sharp edges and foolish grit, with a thin mouth bent into an imprint of a frown. 

“Take this one in, Wood.” 

Harvey scrambles to his feet. “Yes, sir.” 

Schaeffer turns to Lauren and fixes her with an expression that might have meant something back before this job sanded away all of her edges. “You think the Scythe won’t get you?” He barks a clipped, humorless laugh. “You’ll pay for this, _Hound_.”

Lauren flicks the butt of her cigarette, sending an ashen snowflake drifting leisurely through the air before landing on Schaeffer’s cheek. “I’m sure I will.” 

She makes her lazy pilgrimage to the bar, her fingertips pressed lightly over the top of her holster. Her shrewd gaze flicks over the smattering of other patrons like a knife through butter, a quick, calculated assessment that lives and dies in the span of a glance. Hermann wordlessly slides her a stein as soon as she drops into the stool next to him. 

“I have a new job for you,” he says, in lieu of greeting. The slight doesn’t bother her. Hughes Hermann is nothing if not transactional, and Lauren wasn’t expecting praise. 

“Uh huh,” she replies, twisting her cigarette out between her forefinger and thumb. “Who says I’m interested?”

“You’re still listening, aren’t you?” He takes a pull of his beer and wipes his lip with the back of his hand. 

“That remains to be seen.” 

“Maybe this will whet your appetite, then.” Hermann turns to her, that gaze like saltwater narrowed squarely onto her own. “Two thousand, dead or alive.” 

Lauren whistles. It’s the largest bounty she’s ever heard of, meaning two things: First, that other hunters are already well on the scent, and second, that a sizable bounty never comes without an equally sizable caveat. “I don’t like the sound of two thousand,” she murmurs speculatively, one red brow cocked into her hairline. “Sounds like a damn headache.” 

“That’s never stopped you.” 

“What’s the catch?” 

Hermann smirks mirthlessly. “The catch,” he says slowly, “Is that you’re looking for a man with no face.”

  
  


It is, of course, a figure of speech. The man with no face actually does have a face, and, if the crude renderings on the wanted posters are any indication, an objectively handsome one. But that vulpine jaw, that wispy, impish grin and aristocratic nose are all guesswork. Stolen glimpses and diluted eyewitness accounts and whispers spoken through cupped palms. They call him The Purple Hyacinth, an assassin belonging to The Phantom Scythe, a group of bandits simultaneously too organized to be called ragtag and too savage to be deemed respectable. But the Scythe doesn’t deal in respectability. They deal in body counts under the guise of nondescript political goals, a farce which Lauren finds even more deplorable than the acts themselves.

For the average bounty hunter, a man without a face is a compass without a needle. Unfortunately for the Purple Hyacinth, the Red Hound isn’t average. 

Lauren sinks a thumbtack into the board with the pad of her thumb. At this proximity, the red points appear random. Scattered sparks, unconnected pockmarks like raised gooseflesh. It isn’t until she steps back that the board starts to make a sort of anatomical sense. Angry, intersecting lines and geometric shapes that all lead directly to him, the central artery into which everything else leads. 

“I didn’t think you were still awake.” 

Lauren turns to find her uncle regarding her placidly in a square of moonlight. It winks off of his spectacles like a spinning beacon. 

“Ah,” Lauren murmurs, tilting her head towards the board. “Just thinking.” 

“There’s no photograph,” Tristan Sinclair murmurs, tapping his chin. “Why isn’t there a photograph?”

Something sours under her tongue, and she turns back to the poster, scowling at the man as though his image has personally affronted her. “They say that he has no face. No one has ever been able to place him.”

“No one save for you, I’d bet. How will you find him?”

Lauren slides her tongue across her teeth, considering the question. “The same way I always do. I’ll follow the patterns.”

There’s an artistry in the business of bounty hunting, an uncut gemstone among the rubble of all of the savage things. Lauren has always had an affinity for patterns — gyre mazes and constellations and tides. Patterns exist in nature, even in things which appear untamed, like the rings of a tree trunk, the spindly veins of a leaf’s face.

But the most interesting patterns, she finds, are the ones that exist in people. 

Tristan draws a speculative breath, and then he turns to her, with that sharp face so much like her own, all hard-nosed grit and edges like shattered glass. “And what pattern might that be?”

“He leaves a calling card,” Lauren says, tapping her pen against her notes. “A single hyacinth. It’s terribly poetic.” She sucks her teeth in a sneer. “The Scythe aren’t nearly as difficult to track as they like to think they are. All I need to do is follow the flowers.”

Tristan palms the nape of his neck. “The APD has been spinning their wheels trying to track him down. I’m not surprised they finally enlisted your help.”

“Hermann is a stubborn son of a bitch,” Lauren says. “But he’s not stupid. They need me.” 

He huffs, dragging his hand over his chin. “I only hope you know what you’re up against, Ren.”

She smiles toothily. “And for the Hyacinth’s sake, Uncle,” Lauren says, “I hope he knows the same.” 

  
  
  


The following morning, before Lauren sets out to follow the flowers west, she decides to confirm something from the only person in Ardhalis County who lacks either the good sense or self-preservation to fear her. 

“Aye, it’s the fearsome hound herself,” Deputy Kym Ladell says. Her feet are propped up on her desk, one folded over the other. She’s got a deceptively delicate face, like the barometric stillness before a storm. A ceiling fan spins uselessly, stirring dusty heat around like a whirlpool. 

“Aye,” Lauren mocks dryly, “It’s the only law officer I can stand in this godforsaken county.” She drops into the seat opposite Kym, loosening her collar. “Jesus, it’s as hot as Hell in here.”

“You should feel right at home, then. So,” she chirps, sliding her feet off of the desk. “What can I do ya for, Sinclair?”

Lauren tilts her head back, tracing patterns in the water-stained ceiling. “Tell me what you know about the Hyacinth.”

Kym leans forward, sliding her chin in her steepled palms. Her smirk is a wry little half-moon. “I thought Hermann enlisted _your_ help, not the other way around.”

“Cut the shit, Ladell,” Lauren snaps. 

“Careful with your tone, Sinclair. I’m one of your only allies in the precinct.” Her chair creaks lowly as she leans back. “The others aren’t so keen on Hermann enlisting your help in our investigations.”

“How convenient that I don’t answer to them, then.” 

“I do find it interesting,” Kym murmurs, “That you never kill your bounties. Why is that?”

Lauren slides a toothpick between her teeth and chews around it thoughtfully. “Unending patience and a faulty moral compass.” 

“Morals,” Kym says laughingly. “Alright.” She reaches for a key on a hook and uses it to unlock a cabinet to her left. After some searching, she withdraws a map and smoothes out the creases over her desk. Lauren leans forward to inspect it more closely.

It’s an illustration of the county, dotted with little black circles like a smattering of freckles. Lauren traces one of them with her pinkie. “His hits,” she says.

Kym nods. “Most recent was Grayson,” she says, tapping a circle near the western border. “Out near Greychapel.” 

Lauren traces the path lightly, as though reading its heart line. “What else do you know?”

Her eyes grow hardened with a sort of caginess that Lauren reluctantly admires in her. “Not much.”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Lauren murmurs, her fingertip still tracing the marked path. “Lying doesn’t work on me.” 

“Anyone ever tell you you’re pretty damn stubborn?”

“Once or twice.” 

“They target people who speak publicly against the Scythe, especially those with some sort of political power or influence.”

Lauren leans back, thrumming her fingertips against her kneecap. “How accurate do you think that drawing is?” She lifts her chin towards the poster, which Kym has tacked a copy of to her bulletin board.

Kym takes off her hat and spins the brim of it lazily around her fingertip, like a spoon in a cup of tea. “No way of telling,” she replies vaguely. “They call him-”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lauren snaps irritably, flicking her palm out. “The man with no face. We’ll see about that.”

The deputy watches her speculatively for a long moment. “This isn’t another Schaeffer, Sinclair. This one is …” she fixes her gaze out at the flattened horizon line, frowning. “Different.”

“All men are the same when you’ve got them between the ground and the barrel of a pistol,” Lauren replies boredly. She springs to her feet and tucks the map haphazardly underneath her arm. “Thank you for your service, Ladell.”

“Hey! I didn’t say you could _take_ that-”

“I’ll buy you a beer once I bring the Hyacinth back,” she says, twitching her fingers in a wave. “Seeing as I’ll be two grand richer.” 

“ _When_ you bring him back?” 

Lauren cocks her hip against the doorframe. “Ye of such little faith,” she hums. 

Kym chews her lower lip, her dark gaze narrowed. “I think you’re about to get knocked down a peg, Sinclair. And I think it’s going to hurt.” 

“How exciting.” She knocks the edge of the door frame with her knuckle and turns to leave. 

“Sinclair,” Kym calls. “There is one other thing.” Lauren turns, brows drawn in an expression of speculation. 

“What is it?”

“Schaeffer gave us a name. Or, part of one.”

“ _Tch,_ ” Lauren sneers. “I’m not surprised he cracked. What’d he give you?”

Kym shrugs. “Could be a lie. But he gave us the name White.” 

“White,” Lauren murmurs. Her tongue curls sharply around the world. 

Kym flattens her hat back on her head with her palm. A few tendrils of her hair spool loose, short and severe around her face, like blackened waters and charred wood. “White,” she affirms, nodding. 

“Well,” Lauren says. A little suggestion of a grin twists her lips and turns her wicked. “Looks like the faceless man has a name, after all.”

She leaves in the hazy predawn with a map and a drawing of a faceless man and the name which may or may not be his. The sky is soupy and electrified with the promise of a storm, all hot shades of gray that ramble over the scorched earth ad nauseam. The steady thrum of hooves against packed dirt announce her departure, red hair whipping around her face like a harbinger of misfortune. 

Misfortune for the Hyacinth, that is, as things which are lost tend not to stay that way where the Red Hound is concerned. 


	2. The Frog With No Gumption

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A man, Lauren finds, is not so different from a hapless frog.

It might surprise you to know that Lauren Sinclair is exceptionally good at waiting. It is, naturally, of the less glamorable aspects of bounty hunting. But it’s a vitally important one, a game that requires a steady hand and a practiced finesse. 

Growing up, Lauren often entertained herself with her father’s scientific textbooks, dusty tomes with stiff, cracked spines that lined his study walls like rows of teeth. Lauren would spend hours bent over the dense prose, the pad of her thumb tracing the Latin names, desperate to understand even a fraction of the world as her capable, self-assured father had. 

One particular study theorized that if you place a frog on a heated surface, it will sense the imminent danger and flee. However, if you place a frog on a cool surface and gradually add heat, the frog, unable to detect the danger in due time, will remain in place and eventually succumb to the rising temperature. 

A man, Lauren finds, is not so different from a hapless frog.

After several days on the road, the waiting game leads her to a shabby little tavern, a wood-paneled saltbox planted squarely within what she knows to be one of the Phantom Scythe’s most-frequented hubs. If you were to splay the Scythe wide like a cadaver, you’d find an artful symmetry buried within their underground network, concentric routes and veiny pathways that connect to one another like bone joints. 

The passing storm sucked all of the wet heat from the air, leaving in its wake a cool, bluish haze. Lauren’s gaze narrows on the unassuming building, as weathered as though it had sprouted out of the rock and dust itself. 

Harry Anslow’s dusky shadow passes over the windowpane like oil; even at her distance, she can trace the familiar swoop of his posture, the self-assured lilt in his step. He’s backlit in a milky yellow light that spools out onto the front porch, attracting within it a swarm of buzzing gnats. 

She saunters into the tavern, one hand curled over the cool strap of her holster underneath the fabric of her dress. When he sees her, she tilts her gaze to him, chin tipped forward proudly, mouth twisted in a cold little pucker, as though she knows something he doesn’t. 

Lauren orders the Cabernet and lifts it to her lips very slowly. Her fingertips twist the stem of the glass back and forth in a gesture of detached interest, as though she’s never seen a glass of wine before and isn’t particularly impressed. She won’t dare a glance at him now, but she can feel him skirting the edge of her orbit like a comet, his gaze watchful through the tart veil of cigarette smoke and midsummer balm.

She hasn’t finished a quarter of her drink when he sidles up beside her, one elbow planted against the bartop. The other curls lightly over the back of her chair.

“I must have seen you before,” Anslow says. He has a narrow, rat-like face and a thin mustache that tapers off wispily at the ends. The quirk playing at the edges of his thin lips suggests a sickly sort of amusement, a depraved whimsy. “You look so familiar.”

Lauren coils a lock of her black wig around her fingertip. “I’ve been told I look like a lot of people,” she muses. “You must be mistaken.” 

“I wouldn’t forget those eyes. So … _pensive_.” He traces an errant figure eight in the puddle of condensation on the bartop. Lauren bites the tip of her tongue when his free hand traverses a lazy path over the curve of her back, clammy in the places where it collides with her skin. 

“You aren’t going to ask me if I come here often, are you?” 

“Like I said.” He knocks the edge of his empty beer bottle against the bar. “I’d have recognized you. What brings you to these parts?” 

Lauren lifts her shoulders, and her reflection in the window follows. “A change of scenery.” 

Anslow dips his head and his mustache brushes the curve of her ear like wheatgrass. “I wasn’t born yesterday, darling,” he murmurs. “No one pays a visit to a Scythe den for the _scenery_.” 

“Scythe?” Her mouth folds into an incredulous pout. “You mean …” Lauren’s gaze drifts over the tavern’s patrons in a series of slow blinks. She glances back at him slowly, as though moving through running water. “Here?” 

Anslow drags the pad of his thumb over his lower lip. His dark eyes narrow onto her, so brown they appear black, like the mud of a riverbank. “Who are you?”

“How _bold_ of you-”

He drops the hand at her back lower, curling it around the leg of her stool. She anticipates his next move, so her hand is already cupping the top of her holster when he pulls her close to him. The bridge of her nose nearly collides with his collar. He smells of tobacco and scorched earth and salt. “I mean,” he murmurs, low enough to roil a tree’s root. “Who are you _really_?” 

Lauren pulls in a lungful of warm air. She holds his gaze for a long moment, and then she lifts her chin toward the back of the bar in a wordless gesture. 

“Who’s the bold one now?” He purrs.

Lauren stands, holding her open palm behind her, the pads of her fingertips brushing his. She weaves through the thicket of the crowd with deft awareness, as though guided by a phantom touch. 

“It’s awfully loud out here,” she says, rounding a shadowy corner. 

“You know this place,” he replies, his breath hot and unpleasant against the back of her neck. 

Lauren twists a doorknob at the end of the hall. “Of course,” she says, backing into the closet. The thickness of the air is amplified in the narrow space, scented by a heady combination of musk and old liquor. She reaches around him to push the door shut. “I’m very observant.” 

His hands find her hip in the dark, hot and graceless. Still, she bides her time. The heat ticks up very slowly. 

“Observant, is that what you’re calling it?”

“More favorable than masochistic.”

Anslow huffs. “A pretty lady like you just so happens to walk into this place. An interesting turn of fate, is it?” He purrs. His hand tightens around her waist. 

“You don’t believe me?” 

“I certainly don’t believe in _fate_.”

Lauren hums. “We’ll cut to the chase, then.” She peers at his dark form, all angles and teeth, and then glances back at the door. “I needed to get you alone because you know someone I’m looking for.”

Anslow falls into a calculating quiet, then. He drops his palm and leans against a dusty shelf, rattling a case of beer bottles. “I should’ve known,” he spits. “I thought I recognized you.”

Lauren brings a palm to her nape and pulls the wig off. “I’m glad we’re finally on the same page.” When he moves toward the door, Lauren kicks it shut with her foot, then reaches up to grip the back of his neck with her palm. “I wouldn’t try that if I were you,” she murmurs, nudging the barrel of her pistol into his skull. 

He sneers and turns his face toward her, his cheek pressed flush against the door. “You’d make an awful lot of noise with that toy of yours, _Hound._ ”

“Maybe so,” Lauren replies. “Either way, you’re dead with a bullet in your skull, and I’d place my chances of escaping through that vent-” she hitches her thumb up, towards the metal grate above his head, “-at about fifty percent.” She flexes her finger around the trigger. “I like those odds.” 

Anslow swallows thickly. “What do you want?”

“The Purple Hyacinth,” Lauren says. “Where is he?”

When he doesn’t reply, she digs her free hand into her pocket and withdraws the crumpled wanted poster. “Does this refresh your memory?” Lauren slams the poster into the door with her palm and he jumps, edging his bony shoulder into her chest.

“ _Christ_ ,” he spits. 

“I don’t like repeating myself, Anslow.”

“I’ll tell you if you get that goddamn _pistol_ away from my head.” 

She clicks off the safety, loud as a thundercrack in the stagnant air.

“I don’t know where he is.” He draws a shaky breath through his teeth.

Lauren presses her lips into a flat line. The statement is, surprisingly, truthful. “But you know where he _could_ be.”

“ **No**.”

“Anslow, Anslow,” Lauren murmurs. “The only thing I hate more than being _bored_ is being _lied to._ ”

“Fine! There’s … there’s someone who’s been on the Leader’s radar. I suspect he’s the Hyacinth’s next target.”

“Name,” Lauren drawls boredly.

“McTrevor.”

“See how easy that was?” She steps back and he stumbles, gripping the edge of the door frame for purchase. 

Anslow opens his mouth to reply but his words are lost to the crack of the back of her pistol against the base of his neck. He crumples in like origami, head tipped back against the cobwebbed shelf, eyes fallen shut. She watches him in silence, noticing for the first time that the smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose render him somewhat boyish, unassuming. 

“What a shame,” Lauren says.

And then she leaves, soundlessly melting back into the crowd and then the purple dusk beyond, as transient as a wisp of smoke. 

* * *

If Anslow’s tip is correct, it seems that McTrevor has made the last mistake he ever will. That is, of course, dependent on whether or not the Hyacinth beats her to him. 

As she cuts through the blanket of mist, Lauren wonders what constitutes an error egregious enough to warrant execution in a criminal organization. And, by extension, she wonders how many of those executions the Hyacinth has carried out. 

She pulls back the reins, willing her horse into a slower trot. It didn’t take long to figure out where McTrevor lives. It’s been her experience, ironically enough, that men who are brazen enough to align themselves with a criminal organization are also stupid enough to fail to cover their tracks. All she needed to do was consult the road map she’d taken from Ladell’s office in order to narrow down a radius half a mile wide. 

A crack of lightning splits the sky in two, a blue vein like a beacon pointing her to her next destination. A day has passed since her conversation with Anslow, though something in her — call it intuitive or spiritual — tells her that the Hyacinth hasn’t gotten to him yet. A low thrum in her veins grows louder as she draws nearer, as though pulled towards a magnetic pole. 

Ahead is McTrevor’s home, a wood-paneled ranch with a sunken wraparound porch and rain-beaten shingles. She lingers at the lip of the ridge, peering at the flat land beyond. As soon as she rounds the corner, she’ll be visible to both McTrevor and the Hyacinth, if he is here, so she paces back a few hundred yards and tethers her horse to a sturdy oak tree. 

As Lauren drops the rain-slickened reins, a gunshot cracks in the open air, nearly distant enough to be confused for thunder. The sound itself is confusing, compounded by the fact that she knows the Hyacinth only kills with a katana. She freezes, and then, as though compelled on an anatomical level, breaks into an unseeing sprint, keeping close to the the edge of the woods. A shadow slips out of the second story window, smudgy against the backdrop of nightfall. 

“ _Bastard_ ,” she breathes. The rain begins to fall in a steadier cadence, tangling in her hair and wetting her face as she trails the figure stride for stride, like two ships cutting through black waters. Lauren raises her pistol and fires a warning shot far left, and ahead, the figure dodges and drops off of landing and onto the ground. 

She cuts diagonally across the clearing, hoping to divert his attention long enough to compromise his blind spot, but he anticipates the move and mirrors her, breaking off into an erratic, zig-zagging sprint. 

“You insult me,” Lauren pants, scowling through the veil of rainfall. She clenches one eye shut and skids to an abrupt stop, steadying her pistol with her left hand.

Lauren has been doing this long enough to tell that her sudden stillness has confuses him, so she banks on his temporary hesitation and fires again, landing a hair’s breadth from his left arm, just close enough to cut through his jacket and split the fabric. 

She smirks triumphantly. It is, of course, far more difficult to maim with the intention _not_ to seriously wound, and she’s positively pinkened to find that her marksmanship hasn’t wavered.

“Give it up,” she calls, near enough now that she can place the figure at a little over 5’9, slender and wiry, cloaked in a dark overcoat that conceals the toothy edge of a blade at his hip. 

Whether brazen or exceedingly stupid, the man decides not to heed her warning, increasing his pace before veering sharply into the thicket of foliage at the edge of the property. 

Lauren sneers, her chest heaving, and then she darts after him, veering sharply to the left. The cover of the foliage has the eerie effect of sucking the noise from the damp air, leaving behind the rasp of her own respiration and their soft footfalls in the underbrush. She pauses, suspended in the stillness, and it’s only when a hand closes around her torso that she realizes her foolish error. 

“ _You-”_ Lauren spits, rearing her legs back. They collide with the warm and solid surface of an abdomen. The grip loosens just enough for her to spin out and twist the man’s arms behind his back. 

He kicks his leg behind him and sweeps her feet, knocking her onto all fours. Her face collides with the wet earth when he presses his foot further between her shoulder blades.

A growl festers in Lauren’s throat like bile, her irritation growing. With a sweeping push she rolls free, clawing for his own ankle and knocking him to the ground. The momentum gives her enough time to scramble over him, his chest straddled between her knees. One hand closes over his warm throat, holding him flush against the dirt, and the other reaches to pull back the top of his hood.

The moon is split between the treetops, a milky spotlight through the leaves like light through half-closed blinds. But it’s still enough to illuminate the harsh planes of his face, his complexion pallid as he gazes up at her, lips parted and damp with rainfall and perspiration. His eyes, narrowed and brilliantly blue, bore into her own with striking intensity, as though trying to recollect something in her expression. His angular face is framed with coal-dark hair, now mussed and tangled with wind and owing to an effect that is, to her dismay, reluctantly sexy. 

Lauren’s own eyes narrow in turn. “You look nothing like the drawing,” she snaps accusingly. 

Remembering himself, he blinks, and then his lips melt into a lazy smirk, as though warmed by the sun. “The Red Hound herself, come to pay a visit. How exciting.” He twists in her grasp, pivoting so that he hovers above her, dark and wicked and panting, a prelude to something disastrous. 

She brings her head up in an attempt to ram it into his own, but he cranes his own neck forward at the same moment, causing her mouth to collide with his jaw. Her teeth scrape the harsh angle of his chin, tasting of warm earth, like the remnants of a wildfire. 

“My, my,” He drawls. His accent is thick and slow, drawing out the vowels in a lazy, putty-like cadence. “If _that_ was your intention this whole time, all you had to do was say so.”

Lauren rears her head back and writhes in the cage of his arms. “You’ve sure got a lot to say for someone on the receiving end of a pistol,” she replies cooly. Her fingers claw for her holster and he easily anticipates the move, closing his own hand around her wrist. Her pulse batters furiously against the flesh of his palm. 

“That may be so,” he chirps. “But you’re not going to shoot me.”

Lauren’s free hand curls uselessly around a forking root in the dirt, her trigger finger trembling with restraint. She’d very much like to silence this infuriating man, and her curiosity feels like a betrayal of her own person. “Why might that be?” 

“Because,” he says, “You’re looking for Dylan Rosenthal, and I know where he is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!
> 
> AH, I am so very sorry for how long this took me! As you might have guessed, my schedule got disastrously busy since my last update. I don't want to make any promises, but I am hoping that the next update is much quicker :)
> 
> How have you been liking this? This mini arc will be an alternate imagining of the conception of Lune, so it's been really fun to mix canon in with original lore. Kudos and comments make my heart soar, so if you have a moment, I'd love to hear what you think of this!
> 
> As always, I am sending all of my love to you, my dear readers.
> 
> -Rabbit
> 
> EDIT: Y’ALL EVERYONE THINKS SHE KILLED ANSLOW AND SHE ONLY KNOCKED HIM OUT HAHAHA I apologize for the confusion

**Author's Note:**

> Whaddya think, partner?
> 
> Thank you so much for all of the love on Controlled Burn. I'm so sorry I wasn't able to reply to your wonderful comments - I was traveling and then life happened aaaaand I promise to do better this time :-)
> 
> Sending love to you, my friends. Thanks for indulging my weirdness. 
> 
> -Rabbit


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